New Jersey Fired Tea Partier Who Burned Qu’ran

By Joshua Holland | Source

The NY Daily News:

The protester who burned pages from the Koran outside a planned mosque near Ground Zero has been fired from NJTransit, sources and authorities said Tuesday.
Derek Fenton’s 11-year career at the agency came to an abrupt halt Monday after photographs of him ripping pages from the Muslim holy book and setting them ablaze appeared in newspapers.
Fenton, 39, of Bloomingdale, N.J., burned the book during a protest on the ninth anniversary of Sept. 11 outside Park51, the controversial mosque slated to be built near Ground Zero.
Pastor Terry Jones, the Florida clergyman who threatened to burn the Koran that day but later changed his mind.
NJ Transit said Fenton was fired but wouldn’t give specifics.
“Mr. Fenton’s public actions violated New Jersey Transit’s code of ethics,” an agency statement said.
“NJ Transit concluded that Mr. Fenton violated his trust as a state employee and therefore [he] was dismissed.”
Fenton was ushered from the protests by police on Saturday and questioned, but he was released without charges.
“He said, ‘This is America,’ and he wanted to stand up for it, in a Tea Party kind of way,” a police source said.

This guy is a bigoted moron, and I’d have no problem with his termination had he been on the clock — employers do have the right to enforce standards of deportment.
But that’s not the case; Fenton was fired for political expression on his own time, and it doesn’t matter if one agrees with his views or not. This is America, and his political actions, on his own time, are supposed to be afforded the highest level of protection. It’s outrageous that NJ Transit even believes that it is within its rights to can him for his protest, no matter how ugly that protest is.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer with AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/joshua_holland1.